Old Crow Medicine Show, one of the first old-time bands to hit it big, is based in Nashville, but its roots are in upstate New York. The group came together near Ithaca in the late nineties, and on August 4th they return to New York with a show at Central Park’s SummerStage. Earlier this month, the band released its eighth studio record, “Remedy.” Ketch Secor, one of Old Crow’s founders, spoke to me recently about New York’s influence on him, and about the vitality of American music traditions.
“New York state, especially the southern tier, is a hotbed of old-time music,” Secor told me. “I grew up down South, and the only traditional music I heard was volunteer-fire-department bluegrass. ‘Banks of the Ohio’ and the like. I had to come North to hear the old-time sounds of the Southern highlands. The reason has to do with the folk revival, and the efforts of guys like John Cohen, Mike Seeger, the Highwoods String Band, and many more. These were college-educated, Northern youth, southbound and looking for the genuine article. If it weren’t for these New Yorkers, we wouldn’t know the music of Roscoe Holcomb, Tommy Jarrell, Fred Cockerham, and dozens of other deep-holler old-time players that country and bluegrass music long forgot.”
With the success of indie-folk bands like Mumford & Sons, the pop-music scene has changed radically since Old Crow started. Today, residency in certain parts of Brooklyn may require the ability to play the banjo, or at least to own one. But this is not an entirely new thing. “It’s a circular motion, the way traditional music weaves in and out of American popular consciousness,” Secor said. “The Kingston Trio were, in their time, bigger than the Beatles.” In the seventies, acoustic music ascended again, with acts like Stephen Stills, John Denver, and Dolly Parton. “Fiddles and banjos won’t be denied,” Secor said. “I believe they’ll outlast most other American institutions.” And the reach is global. “Go ask a cabbie in Nairobi if they ever heard of country music, and wait for it, wait for it. ‘You mean like Dolly Parton?’ American song will prevail. The good stuff, I mean. Pete Seeger and Woody and Sara Carter did work that’ll long outlast Francis Scott Key.”
Secor is a musical evangelist. He wants people to do more than just listen. “I like libraries so much more than museums,” he said. “I like to take things off the shelves, see? I don’t want my information behind glass or, more likely, behind a screen. I want to experience it, rough it up, beat on it, utilize it, see what I can do with it. Folk music requires this of its participants. Pete [Seeger] always asked the audience to sing along. We are the song, he said.” Secor continued, “I would argue that this continent has the richest musical expression of any place on earth. But music is only as alive as the people who make it. If you’re sitting in front of the computer instead of singing to your kiddos, if you’re stuck in traffic instead of stuck in a festival parking lot with twenty banjos blaring, if you think music is just something to download on your personal device and enjoy on the train home in your ear buds, then you got it all wrong. America has a song on the tip of its tongue that it’s afraid to sing.”
Here is a playlist of American music put together by Secor, with his notes below. “Songs like these can arm you to the teeth,” he said. “But they won’t do a thing if you just press play. You’ve got to be the singer. You’ve got to be the song.”
1. Mississippi John Hurt, “Spike Driver Blues.” The Greeks have Apollo; the Aztecs have Quetzalcoatl. In West Virginia, our heroes swing hammers.
2. Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down.” If it weren’t for whiskey, Charlie Poole would be the king of country music and Jimmie Rodgers would be gandy dancing with Vernon Dalhart, sidetracked somewhere south of Dallas.
3. The Carter Family, “Hello Stranger.” Coronado went mad. De Soto’s grave lay unmarked. But A. P. Carter headed up the holler, stole the riches of American song, and became a radio god.
4. Roscoe Holcomb, “Trouble in Mind.” Roscoe is a ferocious singer, a balladeer, and a miner—not a country star. Probably never listened to the Opry a day in his life, because he never had a radio. Listen to him, and hear what America used to sound like and still did, in some remote places, as late as the nineteen-seventies.
5. Doc and Merle Watson, “St. James Infirmary Blues.” Doc’s love of music was wide and deep. When he was busking on the same corner as we did, fifty years before, he brought an amp with him. He only turned to folk music when rock and roll wouldn’t pay the bills. Hear his love of blues music in this track, his delicate phrasing and powerful delivery.
6. Kitty Wells, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” She’s still the first lady of country music. This song could get you in a lot of trouble back when it first jingled from the jukeboxes of America.
7. Dolly Parton, “Coat of Many Colors.” Rags-to-riches stories today often involve network television, online voting, and a panel of celebrity judges. Dolly did it the hard way.
8. Johnny Cash, “Guess Things Happen That Way.” The late Cowboy Jack Clement wrote this one. Standing out on Belmont Avenue in Nashville while he watched his house burn down a few years ago, he was heard to utter it, in shortened breath, “I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.”
9. Woody Guthrie, “Pastures of Plenty.” Two weeks ago, Old Crow Medicine Show visited the Woody Guthrie Museum and Archives, which just opened in Tulsa last year. Go visit it and see Oklahoma’s shame turned shrine to the granddaddy of frontline folk singers.
10. Dock Boggs, “False-Hearted Lover.” When black railroad workers moved through Norton, Virginia, a young Dock Boggs listened close and applied their sound to his picking. Others, like Frank Hutchison and Dick Justice, did it, too. The cross-pollination of black music and white music was happening long before Elvis went to Memphis.
11. Porter Wagoner and the Wagonmasters, “Green, Green Grass of Home.” Old Crow is privileged to be the newest member of America’s most beloved broadcast, the Grand Ole Opry. Porter sang this one from that stage nearly every night. I was honored to hear him a time or two.
